The present invention relates generally to a data interpreter, and more specifically to a data interpreter, which interprets the raw billing data from Regional Bell Operating Companies using personal computers.
To increase competition and reduce cost to consumers, the Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996 requires telephone companies, such as the Regional Bell Operating Companies, to sell local telecommunication services to resellers at rates lower than what they would otherwise offer directly to end users. With the Regional Bell Operating Companies providing a sense of security and dependability, without such laws, it would be extremely difficult for resellers to compete with them. Even if the prices among the Regional Bell Operating Companies and the resellers are the same, it is unlikely that a typical consumer would go to the resellers, instead of the well-established Regional Bell Operating Companies for services.
The Regional Bell Operating Companies have to allocate some of their capacities for the resellers, who can then sell telecom services directly to the consumers or end-users. When an end-user buys such services from a reseller, actually the end-user is buying the services from the Regional Bell Operating Companies, with the resellers serving as intermediaries. To differentiate themselves from the Regional Bell Operating Companies, the resellers typically provide additional services like long distance or Internet services.
On a monthly basis, the Regional Bell Operating Companies send to the resellers, wholesale invoices that indicate the types of services that each of their end-users has subscribed to and how much the resellers have to pay. Some resellers compare the wholesale invoices from the Regional Bell Operating Companies with their internally-generated bills. Both sets should reconcile to ensure accurate billings from the resellers to the end-users. Such a reconciliation process happens to be a very difficult task for small resellers.
The Regional Bell Operating Companies' wholesale invoices to the resellers can include hardcopies and softcopies. The hardcopies can be just a few numbers indicating the exact amount a reseller has to pay, or the hardcopies can be quite voluminous if the Regional Bell Operating Companies are willing to provide the reseller with details. If the hardcopies include only the exact amount, they would not be that useful to the resellers. For the detailed version, to manually compare the hardcopies with the resellers' internally-generated bills, column-by-column and cell-by-cell, and not to expect mistakes, is unreasonable. The best way to compare should be through the softcopies. However, extracting appropriate information from the softcopies is a challenging task.
For at least four of the Regional Bell Operating Companies, known hereinafter as the RBOCs—Bell Atlantic North, Bell Atlantic South, Bell South and Ameritech—the softcopies consist of rows and rows of texts of raw data in a mainframe-computer data format, such as EBCDIC format. The term EBCDIC typically stands for ‘Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code’. This is an 8-bit code having 256 combinations that stores one alpha-numeric character or two decimal digits in one byte. Each row can be a long and continuous string of alphanumeric characters.
The RBOCs also provide resellers with record layouts describing the raw data or data specifications. The record layouts can be as thick as a telephone book. The layout can include thousands of identifiers, and each RBOC can use different identifiers for the same type of raw data. The data is usually separated into very small parts, which can be known as cells or record types. All of the cells might be of one size, such as 450 bytes or 225 bytes, and may only be partially filled with data. The size of each cell is typically defined in the record layouts.
The softcopies can be as large as 500 Mega bytes. Not only do they include information regarding services provided to the end-users, they also include tremendous amount of irrelevant information, such as information related to the networking environment, historical information or billing information with no charges. Out of the thousands of distinct identifiers, there may just be 20% of them that are related to the billing information. This makes the softcopies very difficult to decipher, let alone use.
The soft copies are generally generated by main frame computers of the RBOCs. Since the raw data is in mainframe data format, one can use mainframe computer programming languages to categorize them based on information in the record layouts. One can then query and extract relevant billing information using query languages.
However, small resellers typically do not have the luxury of using mainframe computers. They have personal computers. With millions of characters, characterized by thousands of identifiers in mainframe computer data formats, the RBOCs' wholesale invoices are extremely difficult to be analyzed by personal computers.
Thus, most resellers just give up trying to reconcile the RBOC wholesale invoices with their internally-generated bills. There may be significant errors in the resellers' bills to their customers. It is not uncommon to have inconsistencies between the RBOCs' bills and the resellers' bills of more than 20%. Many resellers are currently losing 10 to 20% of their margins just due to such billing inaccuracy.
It should be apparent from the foregoing that there is still a need for an apparatus and method to interpret the raw billing data from the RBOCs using personal computers technologies. With typical resellers only having access to personal computers, such an apparatus and method would help them compete more effectively with the RBOCs. This, in turn, will increase competition against the RBOCs and give consumers more choices of local service providers. Eventually, such competition will drive down prices of local telephone services, ultimately benefitting the general public.